Boiling Point: Multiple Crises and the Democratic Deficit.
Kumi Naidoo, the International Executive Director of Greenpeace, has been a leader in human rights, social justice, and environmental activism for over three decades. Allen White of the Tellus Institute interviews Naidoo about how to fix the current democratic deficit and the role of civil society in pushing for system change and system innovation.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, you criticized WEF for being wedded to the concept of "system maintenance" as opposed to necessary "system change." What inspired that critique?
The current historical moment has been described variously as the perfect storm or the boiling point. Over the last few years, we have seen the convergence of multiple crises: an ongoing poverty crisis, a financial crisis, and a climate crisis, among others. Our response to these crises has been incremental tinkering, at best trying to make a broken system work better. Maintaining and protecting the current system dominates debates when what we need is system redesign, system
transformation, and dramatic system innovation.
Those with power in the political and business sectors suffer from deep cognitive dissonance. The facts speak for themselves. We are approaching planetary boundaries even faster than some of the scientific opinion had suggested. In the last decade, we have seen an increase in extreme weather events. According to the Kofi Annan Foundation, we are already losing hundreds of thousands of lives each year from global warming. And if we take the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seriously, then between 60 and 80 percent of known fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground if we are to have a chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.
However, our politicians are far removed from this reality. At the Copenhagen climate negotiations in 2009, it was widely said that we needed a fair, ambitious, and legally binding treaty. What we got was a non-binding deal full of loopholes, and politicians keep pushing back the deadlines. In 2009, we said we needed to reduce emissions in absolute terms by 2015. Now, we believe the best achievable treaty in Paris in 2015 is the one we advocated in 2009, which countries would not even start implementing until 2020.
by Kumi Naidoo,
Executive Director of
Greenpeace International
Perreault Magazine - 42 -
llen White of the Tellus Institute interviews Naidoo
Interview originally published on the Great Transition Initiative website.